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New Kid on the Blogk

Tuesday, 13 July 2004  |  beineri

Some days ago I created an account on kdedevelopers.org out of curiosity or to be able to comment, don't remember anymore. Now that Geiseri has unfrozen the mail notification I'm even able to login and can "create content".
But why should I blog? For sure not because my neighbour does. This German story reports that only 7500 active blogs in the German-speaking area exist. In comparison there are 3.5 millions blogs in the US and also the French and Dutchmen are more active. Reading the planetkde.org feed list there seem to be six or seven German KDE developers listed. So maybe I'm still in good company. :-)
What could I blog? My weekly KDE involvements are mostly boring. I could tell you about people who still create their own non-KDE looking dialog for a line edit despite the existance of qt:QInputDialog and kde:KLineEditDlg (deprecated, see kde:KInputDialog). Applications which survived somehow from KDE2 or even KDE1 times and e.g. create "titles" in qt:QPopupMenu s by setting them disabled and inserting a separator (kde:KPopupMenu::insertTitle() is nice for this). Or API misusage like giving 'i18n("&Do not ask again")' as dontAskAgainName parameter to one of kde:KMessageBox's methods. And last but not least: The "All Files" file mask is not "." on Unix.
A continuous annyoing topic are developers who don't know or don't want to read the KDE User Interface Guidelines (yes, they do exist!) and ignore the availability of technical help (kdesdk/scheck) causing me and countless translators double work fixing wrong capitalization, colon and trailing ellipsis usage.
API fashion show, exposing developers' faults, my favorite bugs and wishes or just funny or thoughtfully stories around KDE - everything is possible. Only time will tell...